The camel's in the tent

There's an old Arab proverb that you should not allow a camel to get his nose in your tent, because soon after, the camel will take over the tent.

I feel very much like that in the issue about Proposition 8 in California.

One of the primary arguments for Prop 8 was that the definition of marriage was laid out in the Bible. That's a fallacy of course, because what the Bible lays out is the relationship between men and women, not the definition of marriage. A Biblical interpretation encourages polygamy (for example, Abraham, Jacob, David, etc.)

What we know as the traditional form of marriage was codified under the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine had a problem. Romans were marrying and divorcing with alarming alacrity. the tenuous nature of marriage made it difficult to know who owned what when marriages failed and people remarried. And that meant it became difficult to know who to tax. So Constantine looked around the empire for an answer and noticed that Christian and Jewish families were absolutely rock stable. He called the leaders of those communities in and said he was going to put the power to define, monitor and perform marriage in the empire. The idea was to put the fear of God into the populace. It worked, of course. Divorces dropped precipitously. Soon after Constantine converted, and the Holy Roman Empire was off and running.

That's where we got the modern definition of marriage as between a man and a woman and what the fight is over. Not the Bible.

For almost 1800 years the definition of marriage has resided in the religious community of the Western world... Until Tuesday, November 4, 2008. On that day, the church gave the definition back to the states of California, Arizona and Florida.

The next step is the definition of what is a man and what is a woman. Think I'm crazy? Coming up on ABC, Barbara Walters is going to be doing a special on Thomas Beatie, a former woman who got a sex change operation, but kept the reproductive organs. It's title is: "What is a man? What is a woman?"

As a Christian, are you weirded out by that? If you voted for Proposition 8, too bad. You no longer have a say. You gave it to the state. Now that the state has the authority to define marriage, it has to define gender now. Without the input of the church. And with that, the camel is in the tent.

More to come...